When Iuliia Mendel, Volodymyr Zelenskyy's former press secretary, sat down with Tucker Carlson for a 90-minute interview, the conversation itself was not the story. What happened next was.
Within hours of the interview's release, EU disinformation researchers began tracking fabricated content citing it: fake front pages of French, German, and Polish newspapers quoting the interview selectively and out of context; social media posts attributed to named European politicians who had never made those statements; and translated clips edited to alter meaning and distributed through networks of coordinated inauthentic accounts.
The Mendel interview itself was a wide-ranging discussion of Ukraine's communications strategy, the war's trajectory, and the challenge of maintaining Western public support. Mendel was candid about the limitations of wartime PR and the tensions in how Ukraine's message was received across Europe.
The disinformation operation took specific passages out of context and combined them with fabricated quotes attributed to Mendel to construct a false narrative: that Ukraine's leadership had privately conceded military defeat and was concealing casualties from Western partners. Fact-checking organisations in Germany, France, and Poland traced the fabricated front pages to a network previously linked to Russian state-affiliated information operations.
The campaign's technical sophistication set it apart from earlier disinformation pushes. The fabricated front pages were produced with high graphical fidelity — matching the typography, masthead design, and layout conventions of the publications they mimicked. Without side-by-side comparison, the forgeries were difficult for non-specialist readers to identify.
Distribution followed a pattern familiar to disinformation researchers: initial seeding on Telegram channels, followed by migration to X (formerly Twitter), then into Facebook groups in Central and Eastern Europe where pro-Russian narratives have existing audiences. Translation into Polish and Romanian extended the campaign's reach to two of Ukraine's key neighbouring EU member states.
EU disinformation monitors have publicly flagged this campaign as the most technically advanced targeting European audiences in 2026 to date. That assessment reflects not just the quality of the fabricated materials but the strategic coherence of the targeting: the campaign was designed specifically to erode support for Ukraine in EU member states that are significant providers of military and financial assistance.
Mendel and Zelenskyy's office have both publicly flagged what they describe as coordinated Russian efforts to manipulate European public opinion ahead of key EU decisions on Ukraine support packages. Mendel specifically called out the fabricated front pages as a new escalation in information warfare tactics directed at European democracies.
The sophistication of this campaign illustrates how far Russian information operations have evolved. The focus on EU audiences — rather than purely on American politics — reflects a strategic recalibration: the Kremlin understands that European public opinion now matters more than American public opinion for the sustainability of Ukraine's support. The EU's ability to counter these operations is being tested, and the answer so far is that the continent remains structurally vulnerable: open media environments, multilingual publics, and the virality of social platforms all give coordinated disinformation campaigns room to operate faster than fact-checkers can respond.
